Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World 1600-1800

Crawford Gribben, Scott Spurlock, Crawford Gribben, Scott Spurlock, Crawford Gribben, Scott Spurlock

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137368980
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

For many English puritans, the new world represented new opportunities for the reification of reformation, if not a site within which they might begin to experience the conditions of the millennium itself. For many Irish Catholics, by contrast, the new world became associated with the experience of defeat, forced transportation, indentured service, cultural and religious loss. And yet, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, the Atlantic experience of puritans and Catholics could be much less bifurcated than some of the established scholarly narratives have suggested: puritans and Catholics could co-exist within the same trans-Atlantic families; Catholics could prosper, just as puritans could experience financial decline; and Catholics and puritans could adopt, and exchange, similar kinds of belief structures and practical arrangements, even to the extent of being mistaken for each other. This volume investigates the history of Puritans and Catholics in the Atlantic world, 1600-1800.

Introduction

Crawford Gribben

A great deal of recent scholarship has focused on the emergence in early modernity of one or more Atlantic worlds. These publications have explored – often in extraordinary detail and with exceptional nuance – the processes by which individuals, institutions, communities, and states expanded in power and prestige as a new continent gradually emerged on the other side of the Atlantic. Religion and religious identity have, of course, played an important role in many of these scholarly narratives. For many English Puritans, for example, the New World represented new opportunities for the reification of reformation, if not a site within which they might begin to experience the conditions of the millennium itself. For many Irish Catholics, by contrast, the New World became associated with the experience of defeat, forced transportation, indentured service, cultural and religious loss. And yet, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, the Atlantic experience of Puritans and Catholics could be much less bifurcated than some of the established scholarly narratives have suggested. Puritans and Catholics could co-exist within the same trans-Atlantic families; Catholics could prosper, just as Puritans could experience financial decline; and Catholics and Puritans could adopt and exchange similar kinds of belief structures and practical arrangements. As Polly Ha and Philip Lockley illustrate in different periods and contexts, this could even reach to the level of being mistaken for each other. Of all the ‘odd couples’ represented in Francis J. Bremer’s contribution to this volume, Puritanism and Catholicism may have been the most strange in the early modern Atlantic world.

This volume suggests some of the new kinds of religious relationships which were made possible within the Atlantic world. Throughout early modernity, Protestant and Catholic churches routinely defined themselves as being in opposition to each other. For many years, historians took those claims at face value. The Reformation was imagined to be a primal moment: Christendom was divided and states entered new and rival religiously driven alliances; and when, with the assault on the doctrine of purgatory, links were broken between the living and the dead. But recent scholarship has questioned this narrative, and the scholarly moves and motives which often lay behind this thinking. Historians are now increasingly reluctant to describe the relationship between Protestant and Catholic institutions as binary and oppositional. Eamon Duffy’s work has insisted that reformist ideas in Protestant England were adopted neither rapidly nor universally, for example. Protestants continued to consume Catholic texts into the seventeenth century. Much of their reading was focused on the classics of medieval theology, but Protestants also adopted a number of contemporary Catholic works. Richard Baxter’s experience of conversion was, after all, driven by his reading of an adaptation of the Jesuit Robert Person’s Resolution (1580). This volume sets out to consider how the context of the early modern Atlantic allowed for the circulation of Puritan and Catholic ideas, institutions and personnel, and how the Atlantic experience fostered internal change within these communities, as well as changes in the relationship to each other of their ideas, institutions, and personnel. It explores some of the implications of a shift in scholarly focus on Puritan-Catholic relationships, from England looking east towards the zero-sum contest of the Thirty Years War to England looking west towards the challenge and promise of the New World.

This volume represents a necessary and often innovative perspective on the religious experience of trans-Atlantic expansion. A number of contributions offer important new case studies in the experience of and relationship between Puritans and Catholics in the early modern Atlantic world. A number of the following chapters illustrate the processes by which puritans adopted fixed positions in the rhetorical and theological debates of the period. Ema Vyroubalová’s chapter focuses on a single text which encoded some of the key tensions between Catholics and ‘hot protestants’ in the English world. The positions adopted in Samuel Ward’s print, The Double Deliverance (1621), were re-inscribed with each reprinting of the text until the plates began to wear. And yet, as Vyroubalová indicates, this technically and linguistically complex print may have been more troubled than many of its readers may have realised. Polly Ha’s consideration of ‘the politics of prayer’ shows how a single debate could resonate with concerns which drew upon the rhetorical and theological environment of the eastern Atlantic. By focusing on a party within the broader movement of the godly, Ha demonstrates that Puritans defined themselves as being necessarily in opposition to what they perceived to be a Catholic faith with the imperial ambition of destabilising the English church. Yet in Ha’s account, Puritan identity depended on the identification of a Catholic threat far more than Catholic identity depended on the existence of the hotter sort of Protestants. A much greater degree of ideological mutuality is demonstrated in Bremer’s chapter, which illustrates the concerns of a series of families which internalised the religious divisions of Christendom. Bremer’s argument is made compelling by the fact that so many of the individuals he describes struggled to find a permanent spiritual home, and that some of those who moved from the Church of England to that of Rome eventually came home again. Within that cycle, it is ironic that some of those who most vigorously defended their conversion to the Catholic faith were among those who would ultimately abandon it. Theological positions are, after all, discursive, and never as monolithic as apologists would want us to believe. Nor are they always projected against an ‘other’ on the opposite side of the Reformation. Michael Winship’s exploration of the emergence of a distinctive ecclesiological party within the ‘big tent’ of trans-Atlantic Puritanism illustrates the early existence of tensions which would shatter the unity of the godly in the British and Irish civil wars of the 1640s. Edward Simon’s reflection upon spiritual geography and its inversions illustrates how a close reading of American texts can identify moments of cohesion and inversion within the Puritan world. For Cotton Mather was among a new generation of writers to self-identify as American in opposition to the declining Protestant zeal of England.

Other chapters in this volume offer useful reminders that the aims and concerns of Puritans and Catholics in the Atlantic world were often shared. Members of both groups could see the realities of colonial expansion in similar terms. David Manning’s description of a long-standing moral critique of Port Royal, Jamaica, represents striking similarities between advocates of these competing religious discourses. In truth, many members of these communities experienced colonial expansion in parallel. For example, the subjects of Jordan Landes’s discussion of Quaker institutionalism would have found much in common with those of R. Scott Spurlock’s chapter on the condition of Catholicism in the British Atlantic. Quakers, Baptists, and Catholics all had to negotiate the experience of marginality and (at least initially) the absence of traditionally identified spiritual leaders. Each of these communities responded to this challenge in different ways: the Quaker hostility to clerical authority was shared partially by other ‘radicals’ such as Baptists, and not at all by Catholics (although, in many Atlantic contexts, it was Catholics who faced the greatest difficulty in securing adequate pastoral care). Andrew Crome, by contrast, illustrates the extent to which these communities could develop shared hopes, which were mutually reinforced through extensive extra-confessional reading. Crome demonstrates that a belief in the conversion of the Jews, long thought to be an apocalyptic trope peculiar to Puritans, was also an expectation of Iberian Catholics, whose writing these Puritans eagerly consumed. His conclusions should be compared with those of Robert Armstrong, who describes the extent to which the opportunities of the Atlantic experience provided Ulster Presbyterians with an important foil for understanding their situation at home. And yet, as in Ha’s discussion of the ‘politics of prayer’, Crome demonstrates that Puritans may have appropriated Catholic texts more often than vice versa. Puritan identity needed Catholics in a way that Catholic identity did not need Puritans. In other words, throughout the period, in a variety of contexts and with a variety of ends, Catholics and Puritans shared experiences – and sometimes even books – as they experienced, together, the contingencies of life in the trans-Atlantic world.

2

Families and Religious Conflict in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Francis J. Bremer

On 13 July 1597, Adam Winthrop, a patron of the Puritan Reformed movement in England’s Stour Valley and the father of the future Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop, recorded in his diary that ‘my cousin Alabaster fatebatur se esse papistam [admitted that he was a papist]’.¹ A little more than a year after his visit to Groton and confession of his conversion, William Alabaster was admitted to the English College in Rome, where he provided answers to a series of six questions put to all seeking admission. In the course of those answers, he referred to his mother’s family as the ‘ancient and renowned family of Winthrop’.²

The story of William Alabaster is one of three examples which I will use to explore why and how individuals in the same family, raised in the Protestant Church of England, chose to embrace Puritan reform in some cases, and, in other cases, Roman Catholicism. One might expect that members of a family, possessing the same heredity and raised in virtually the same circumstances, would display similar religious commitments. Yet, neither nature nor nurture explains the choices of the individuals I wish to discuss – men who not only chose different religious camps, but who became leaders in those camps. In the end, I should admit, I will have no definitive answer to explain their choices. But I hope that by telling these stories, I may prompt useful discussion that can help us to better understand the complexities of the religious age investigated in this book.

William Alabaster was born in Hadleigh, Suffolk, in 1568, the son of Roger Alabaster, a merchant, and Bridget Winthrop. William’s uncle, Thomas Alabaster, was a London merchant engaged in the Spanish trade who occasionally acted as an agent for William Cecil. Another uncle, William Winthrop, had been a member of the underground Protestant church in London during the reign of Queen Mary and a patron of Puritan livings in the years that followed. Alabaster’s uncle, Adam Winthrop was the father of the John Winthrop who would lead the Great Migration to establish the Puritan colony of Massachusetts. Adam Winthrop was married to Alice Still, the sister of John Still, rector of Hadleigh, who became Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and later Bishop of Bath and Wells – remaining a Puritan sympathiser in all these positions. Still, he married Alabaster’s cousin, Anne Alabaster. There were few more Protestant and reform-inclined families in England.³

Through Still’s influence, Alabaster entered Westminster School in 1578, and was chosen one of the Queen’s scholars to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1583. He graduated with a BA in 1588 and was elected a fellow of the college. Alabaster had already shown a flair for literature, and it is thought that his Latin tragedy Roxana was first performed at this time in the college. He was also working on an epic poem in praise of Queen Elizabeth, the ‘Elisaeis’ (never completed), which he showed to Still’s friend, Edmund Spenser, when the latter visited Cambridge in 1591. Spenser subsequently praised Alabaster in his Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1595).⁴

In 1595, Alabaster played a prominent role in a set of academic disputations organised by the earl of Essex for the Cambridge commencement. The following year he was appointed catechist at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in the same year, joined the earl of Essex as a chaplain on the Cadiz expedition. It was in that captured city that he had his first close contacts with Catholics and Catholic worship. On returning to England, he turned down the living at Brettenham, Suffolk, but accepted the richer living of Landulph, Cornwall, from the earl of Essex, who by then was identified as his patron. William’s cousin Joshua Winthrop was one of the guarantors for the first fruits for the living.⁵

At Eastertide in 1597, Alabaster travelled to London in search of further preferment, which he felt he needed to be able to afford to marry. But while staying with Dean Gabriel Goodman of Westminster, he encountered Father Thomas Wright, a Roman Catholic priest under house arrest. It was hoped that the brilliant Alabaster would convert Wright, but it was Alabaster who ended up being converted. Alabaster returned to Cambridge, broke off his planned marriage, and began to share with friends his attraction to Roman Catholicism. It was during this summer of 1597 that he visited his Winthrop kin in Groton, the same summer that he wrote many of his religious sonnets. In September, intercepted letters of Wright indicated Alabaster’s conversion, and Richard Bancroft, the bishop of London, sent orders to Cambridge that the college authorities place Alabaster under close confinement. When efforts by the various college heads failed to shake him from his new beliefs, he was sent to London. Meanwhile Alabaster had expressed his reasons for converting in a manuscript referred to as the ‘Seven Motives’. It was intercepted when he tried to have it delivered to Essex, whom he hoped would protect him. Although never published, the ‘Seven Motives’ can be reconstructed from references to it in two published answers, by John Racster and Roger Fenton.⁶

Through the winter of 1597, Alabaster was interrogated in London by various church leaders – including Richard Bancroft, Alabaster’s kinsman John Still, and Lancelot Andrewes – all of whom attempted to undo his conversion. When these efforts failed, he was deprived of his orders and benefices on 20 February 1588. Because he was denied both a martyr’s fate and a public chance to defend his views, Alabaster took advantage of loose security to escape his confinement in the Clink, a prison in Southwark.⁷ In November 1598 he took up residence at the English College in Rome, where he prepared a lengthy manuscript narrative of his conversion. By early 1599, Alabaster was in Spain, and in the summer of the same year he set out to return to England. Captured by English agents in La Rochelle, he was transported to London and lodged in the Tower, where he was questioned by William Cecil. Alabaster claimed to have been sent to England to conspire on behalf of the Pope with the earl of Essex, charges which played into the hands of the earl’s enemies and surfaced at Essex’s trial in 1601. Alabaster was moved to Framlingham Castle in 1601. He was pardoned at James I’s accession in 1603 but was arrested again in 1604. While there is no evidence at this point that he had abandoned his conversion to Catholicism, he was clearly troubled by the conflicts within the English Catholic community, and offered to spy (for Cecil) on Catholic priests acting against the crown. He was released and returned to Europe. In 1607 he published, without an imprimatur, his Apparatus in revelationem Jesu Christi, a book of cabbalistic divinity that some Catholics considered heretical. In 1609, he was back at the English College in Rome where he became alienated from Father Robert Persons, then head of the college. He became involved in college plots and denounced Persons to the Inquisition. But it was Alabaster who was brought before that tribunal, which condemned his Apparatus in 1610 and ordered him to remain in Rome.⁸

Disenchanted, Alabaster fled to Amsterdam and then returned to England. He made his peace with the Church of England, and won the king’s favor with a Latin poem presented to the monarch on the marriage of the royal favourite, Robert Carr, in 1613. At the king’s command, he was absolved from his heresy by Archbishop George Abbot, and subsequently created Doctor of Divinity at Cambridge in 1614.⁹ He was granted the living of Therfield, Hertfordshire. In 1615 he preached before the king at Whitehall and two years later preached a sermon at St. Paul’s which some felt smacked of popery – according to an account reported in 1629 by Oliver Cromwell in his maiden speech...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Families and Religious Conflict in the Early Modern Atlantic World
• 3  Catholics in a Puritan Atlantic: The Liminality of Empires Edge
• 4  Catholic and Puritan Conspiracies in Samuel Wards The Double Deliverance (1621)
• 5  Spiritual Treason and the Politics of Intercession: Presbyterians, Laudians and the Church of England
• 6  Straining the Bonds of Puritanism: English Presbyterians and Massachusetts Congregationalists Debate Ecclesiology, 163640
• 7  The Jewish Indian Theory and Protestant Use of Catholic Thought in the Early Modern Atlantic
• 8  Reformation and the Wickedness of Port Royal, Jamaica, 1655c.1692
• 9  Cotton Mather, Heterodox Puritanism, and the Construction of America
• 10  The London Yearly Meeting and Quaker Administrative Innovation in an Atlantic Context
• 11  Thinking Like a Presbyterian in 1690s Ireland
• 12  With the Papists They Have Much in Common: Trans-Atlantic Protestant Communalism and Catholicism, 17001850
• Bibliography
• Index